Domination of the Orcs Ch. 04

Chapter 4

A'lex rose.

The name sat differently in his mouth than Alexander ever had. Shorter. Heavier. A thing the Dravahk'ran had made of him, spoken now as if the name had been waiting for a body that could carry it.

Ai'mal'ee watched him dress. She had not covered herself, among her people a thrall who hid the marks of claiming insulted the one who had put them there, and she was not a woman who insulted what she worshipped. Oil glistened along the insides of her thighs, dark and fragrant, prepared for the rite.

"The yard will fill," she said. "Gurall will want you seen before the first blood is spilt. The Cockless will want you seen as our champion."

"I am already yours."

"You are. That is not the same as being seen." She tipped her chin toward the flap of the tent. "They chose you in the dark, Master. Today they will watch the Horde learn what that choice costs."

He buckled the last strap. The armor no longer fit the way paladin-plate had been meant to fit. The chest was tight across a broader frame. The codpiece had been cut away and not replaced; there was no honest way to hide what he carried now. The knot sat at the base of his cock like a promise, half-swollen even in the cool of morning.

Ai'mal'ee's gaze dropped there and stayed. Hunger, raw and burning, and anticipation, filled her gaze.

The Dravahk'ran encampment occupied the old temple quarter of Castle Blacksun, newly renamed from Brightdawn, a ruin of black stone and fire-scored columns the Horde had never bothered to pull down. They had hung their own gods in the empty niches and let the old ones burn. Between two fallen pillars, a circle had been swept clean and laid with furs. No crowd. No witnesses but the ones who already believed. A handful of cockless warrioresses stood at the edge of the stones and did not look away. This was not a private act. It was a private place. The distinction mattered.

Ai'mal'ee went to her knees in the center and then further, folding forward until her cheek met the fur and her ass lifted. She reached back with both hands and opened herself. The gesture had the practiced quality of a prayer, as if she had done this in her mind a thousand times before finally being allowed to carry it out.

"The Cockless offer first what cannot conceive," she said, loud enough for the watchers. "We offer the hole that takes without asking to keep. We offer it to the human master the goddess gave us. We offer it so the Horde will know the choosing was not an accident of fate."

A'lex stepped into the circle.

The thing his body had become wanted no preamble. The paladin still left in him wanted a vow or some scrap of chapel language that could make this look like anything other than what it was. Neither of the two sides of him got everything they wanted. He put one hand at the small of her back, set the broad head of his cock against her asshole, and pushed.

She was not unprepared. Oil, or something older than oil, had been worked into her. Even so, the stretch was obscene. He was built now for an orc's capacity, and she was built to take a human master, and the two facts met in a thick, resisting slide that pulled a sound out of her almost like a laugh and almost like a scream.

"Yes," she moaned into the fur. "That. Do not be gentle with me, Master. The goddess commands that I endure everything you can give."

He gave her the rest.

The knot met her rim and stopped, a fat, blunt pressure that made her fingers dig into her own cheeks. He did not force it. Not yet. He stroked his massive fuck-log in and out if her, long strokes that dragged the ridge of the knot against her hole on every withdrawal and made her breath hitch on every return. The watchers did not murmur, didnt move. They had the stillness of people at an altar.

The man who had worn Alexander's name wanted to ask if she was ok, if this was truly what her faith required, if any mercy could unmake the biology now forced upon him. The question died against the wet clasp of her ass and the way she pushed back to take him deeper.

Ai'mal'ee reached back and found his wrist.

"The knot," she said. "The rite is not finished until it locks. Orcs do not tap at the door like guests."

He dropped his weight, forcing himself in.

The knot punched through her rim with a thick, obscene pop and seated. She made a raw noise and then locked her jaw around it, as if the sound itself had been a sin. Her ass clamped down in a series of hard, helpless flutters as he felt the knot lock inside his new slave's ass, her body closing behind the swell, holding him. His balls drew tight against her. The first pulse of ore left him in a heavy, prolonged spill that had nothing of human seed in its weight or chinky thickness. She took it with her face in the furs and her hands still holding herself open, as if even with her master's cock knotted in her ass she would not be accused of resistance.

They stayed like that while the knot throbbed and her body learned the shape of it, molded her ass to every contour of the hard knot trapped in her shitter. The watchers did not move. Somewhere beyond the ruined quarter a horn sounded from the great yard, impatient, belonging to a different law.

When the swell receded enough to let him draw free, the plop made her shudder and groan. Ore followed the withdrawal in a slow, gleaming string and striped the fur between her knees. She stayed down a moment longer, breathing, then looked back over her shoulder.

The rite was finished.

He was not.

Ai'mal'ee saw it in his face before he moved. Something human and unbroken, a will that did not belong to Mystica or to the Cockless or to any law or rite the Horde had ever carved into their scribe-stones.

"That hole is not part of the rite," she said, and there was no refusal in it, only the naming of a fact and the slight nervousness of being taken somewhere far more sensitive than her asshole.

"I know."

She held his eyes. Then she reached down, past the mess of her ass, and opened her cunt with two fingers. The gesture was almost curious, as if she were offering a thing she had never thought to give.

"Yes," she said. "If you want it. Take that too."

He pushed into her cunt.

The difference was immediate. Softer and wetter. A slick wetness her body had kept in reserve for the sole purpose if broadcasting her abject degradation and humiliation to the master who would claim her ass. She made a sound she had not made on the first claiming, smaller, startled, almost offended at her own pleasure, and then she pushed back onto him as if she would be damned if anyone said she took a human gift poorly.

He did not knot her there. He did not need to. He fucked her until the second spend took him, shorter than the first, and when he pulled free she stayed open on her hands and knees and let both holes drip onto the fur where the watchers could see the difference. Ass first, as the faith required. Cunt after, because he was her master and had demanded it.

She rose on unsteady legs and did not clean herself.

"I pledge," she said, and the watchers leaned in a fraction. "Before the circle, before the Cockless, before the gods that still answer in this quarter. A'lex is master of the Dravahk'ran. I am his. My faith is his. My holes are his. If the Horde names another, the Horde names a lie."

No one contradicted her. The horn sounded again from the yard, closer to anger now.

He stepped out into the light and she followed, wet-marked and unafraid, and the Dravahk'ran opened a path for them as if a door had always been there.

They returned to the great yard before Castle Blacksun.

The Horde had filled it the way floodwater fills a basin, the banners of a dozen tribes snapped along the palisades. Warrioresses stood in ranked knots of green hide and iron, tusks oiled, cocks bound or left to hang according to the custom of their tribes. Every orc in that yard was cut from the same cloth, broad, muscular, a mix of heavy iron corded sinew and soft female flesh. The Dravahk'ran were the exception and had always been the exception. They stood in their own rank near the old temple steps, cockless, narrower in the shoulder, watching A'lex the way a congregation watches a messiah tske tonthe ssnds for battle.

Gurall sat the dais alone.

The Empress of the Unified Horde did not fidget, she had the stillness of a mountain that had stood alone for centuries. Grindal stood at the foot of the steps, stripped to her fighter's wrap, rolling one shoulder and then the other. She was her mother's height and nearly her mother's width, a full-orc warrioress in the prime of her youth, cock heavy against her thigh, cunt a dark slit beneath the root of it. She had no thralls, and had never needed any, proclaiming to all and sundry that her seed would fill a noble, her cock would break a princesses ass, before she'd deign to mount some scrawny, dirty tavern-girl.

To the left of the dais a low platform held the prizes.

Six human women. No gowns. No thrall-cloths. No crossing of linen that might have let them pretend this was still Charlotte's

court. They stood naked in the morning air, and the Horde looked at them the way it looked at any other meat that had been weighed and found acceptable. They were a mix, as the old tribute-lists preferred, pale and dark, gold-haired and black. One wore a tight cap of russet curls. One wore a long rope of night-black hair bound in a soldier's knot. One had the deep brown of the southern coast. One had freckled shoulders never meant for this latitude. Anne was among them. A'lex found her eyes and lost them again. She had been a squire's sister once, in a life that would never return.

Charlotte was not on the platform. A'lex saw her, bent over before Gurall, impaled once again on the bitch-breaking knot of her mistress.

Gurall stood.

The silence that waited for her was the silence of a yard that understood the next words would change the order of the world.

"Before the Unified Horde, before the banners, before the old stones of this castle," she said, "a tourney was called. The Cockless have named a master. That naming is their right. The Horde tests what it is asked to accept." Her gaze cut to A'lex, then to her daughter, then to the six. "The victor takes the heir's measure. The victor takes the six. Unmounted. Intact. What is done with them after is the victor's preference, not mine."

A murmur moved and died.

Grindal's tusks flashed. "As the Empress wills. Try not to spend yourself before I get to you, Master of the Cockless. I have waited a long time for a fight that might be worth the effort."

A'lex looked at Gurall. "I accept."

Gurall sat. "Then begin. And do not have it said I stacked the first fight."

The first champion was called Urgha of the Broken Tusk.

She came in fast and happy, a scarred warrioress with a cock that slapped her thigh when she ran and a laugh that had outlived better women than A'lex. He met her the way a paladin mmeets a cavalry charge, square, economical, without ornament. The first exchange split his lip on a green, scarred fist. The second put her on one knee. The third put her down. She staggered up, laughing through blood, and came on again, and he put her down a second time and left her there because the law of the tourney didn't require a corpse.

The bloodlust rose a notch. His cock thickened against nothing. He ignored it.

The second champion lasted longer and said less. The third used a chain. The fourth used her teeth. He broke the chain, weathered the teeth, and sent each of them back to their banners in a condition that would let them walk. The Horde liked that, screaming and hooting at the shed blood and the carnal violence.

Between bouts he stood in the sun and breathed and tried not to look at the platform. Anne's arms were folded over her breasts as if she could still feign modesty. The russet-haired one had both hands at her sides and was shaking. The dark-haired soldier's-knot girl had her chin up and her eyes on the middle distance, the way women stared when they had decided the present was a thing to be endured, instead of a future to hope for.

Ai'mal'ee watched from the Dravahk'ran ranks silently, she had already said her piece in the circle. The rest was the will of Mystica.

The bloodlust rose higher. His cock was fully hard by the fifth bout, the knot a fat, obvious swell at the base, a bead of pale ore gathering at the slit and threatening to fall. A warrioress in the front rank saw it and made a short, ugly sound of approval. Gurall did not look at him. Grindal did. She was smiling with all of her teeth.

"Enough of the lesser tribes," she said, when the fifth had been dragged clear. She stepped off the foot of the dais and into the beaten earth. "I am the Heir. Let me show you what the blood of the High Chieftainess is for."

Grindal was fast.

Faster than her size would suggest. She came in behind a feint that would have taken the jaw off a slower fighter and followed it with a shoulder that hit like a ton of bricks. A'lex gave ground, found it again, and met the next blow the way he had been taught to by an aged chapter-master in the croft of Valorum, off-angle, inside the power, turning her mass against the line of her own hip. She laughed.

"Better," she said. "I was worried the Cockless had saddled themselves with a priest."

She hit him in the face.

The world tilted, came back, and he was still standing, which seemed to please her more than dropping him would have. She pressed. He pressed back. Paladin footwork and orcish weight met in a grinding, close exchange that had nothing of tournament prettiness in it. The Horde had gone quiet, each orc waiting with excitement and bated breath to see the outcome.

His cock dragged against her hip in the clinch. She felt it and grinned wider.

"Well at least some part of you is Orc," she said. "Go on, show me what else you carried out of that witches circle, human boy."

She came in again, faster.

He met her. The bloodlust, which had been a heat at the base of his spine through the lesser bouts, woke properly then, it thickened the air, put a tremor in his hands that was not fear. A thread of ore left him on the next hard turn, a pale, metallic smear that caught the light as it left the head of his cock and landed, wet and accidental, across the hard green plane of her thigh.

They both felt it.

Grindal's grin faltered, not from pain but from the wrongness of something within her being wrenched away while she wasn't looking. She hit him anyway, a short, ugly hook that split his lip a second time, and he took it and put his forehead into her mouth and they broke apart breathing hard.

The smear on her thigh began to work.

It was a small thing at first. A flush under the green. A tightness, as if the skin had been asked a question it did not like. Grindal glanced down, snorted dismissively, and came on again. She had been hit with worse than a man's drip. She had been hit with axes.

A'lex saw the first change before she did.

The heavy cock against her thigh twitched. Once. A small, involuntary jerk, like a sleeping babe kicking. Then it twitched again, and the second motion was not arousal, but a withdrawal. The shaft thickened oddly at the base and thinned toward the head, as if the blood that had kept it hard and thick were being called somewhere else.

Grindal felt that.

She looked down in the middle of a step she had not meant to give.

"What--"

He hit her. He had to. The fight was not paused for her confusion or his. The blow took her in the ribs and drove a grunt out of her, and she answered it with a knee that would have ended a human man and only folded A'lex in half. They clinched. Her cock was a slack, diminishing thing now, trapped between their bellies, and she made a sound of pure affront and tried to get a hand on it as if she could hold it in place by force of will.

The Horde had begun to understand. The sound that moved through the ranks was not a cheer, not yet. Recognition, maybe. Or the start of fear.

The transformation unfolded the way a fire unfolded through dry timber, not all at once, and not in any order that made sense. Muscle left her shoulders first, the thick fighting slab of them softening, shrinking, the green hide loosening as the mass beneath it was unmade. Her breasts, which had been small and hard against a warrioress's chest, swelled a cup, then more, as if the body were relocating what it had been told to discard. She felt the absence of her cock before the thing was fully gone, a cold, specific vacancy at the front of her. The head drew back into a body that no longer had a use for it. The shaft followed. The balls tightened and emptied and vanished against the seam of her until there was only a cunt where a full-orc's doubled sex had been.

She hit him in the face with the heel of her hand and the blow had less behind it than the last one. She noticed. He recognized the horror of it in her eyes. She hit him again anyway, furious, and the fury was the most orcish thing left on her.

"No," she said, and the word came out thinner than she had meant it to, choked and strangled with fear.

He took her to the ground.

It took longer than it should have. She was still Grindal. She was still the heir. She still knew where to put an elbow and how to turn a hip and how to make a man pay for every inch of dirt but the body she was doing it with was being rewritten under his hands, minute by minute, and the rewrite did not care about her bloodline or her righteous fury. The last of the cock was a slack, useless nub when he pinned her shoulders. By the time he got a forearm across the newly softened column of her throat it was gone. A cunt, bare and new, sat where her doubled sex had been. Her hips had narrowed. Her ass had taken on a soft roundness that looked like an insult on a warrioress of the High Chieftainess's blood. She bucked, and the buck was strong, but it was not strong enough. A'lex straddled her, pinning her beneath his now-larger bulk.

Silence.

Grindal stared up at him. Blood from her mouth ran along her tusks and dripped into the hollow of a throat that no longer had a fighter's strength in it. She was breathing hard, chest heaving like a bellows, doing interesting and new things to her new, larger tits.. She was still trying to find a leverage that her new weight would not give her.

He could have stopped there. He could have raised her up, shown the yard a beaten heir, and let Gurall name the rest.

The orc inside him rebelled. Ai'mal'ee had taught him, tied and dripping, what the old law required. Defeat was not submission. Submission was a hole conquered and taken where the Horde could see it done.

He looked, last, at Gurall.

The Empress's face was stone. Only the smallest tilt of her head was permission enough.

A'lex turned Grindal onto her belly in the dirt.

She understood. Of course she understood. She got her knees under her with a soldier's economy, dropped her cheek to the beaten earth, and reached back with both hands to open her ass. The gesture had none of Ai'mal'ee's almost religious awe. It had the blunt competence of a warrioress performing the rite she had watched other women perform and had never thought would be asked of her.

"By the old law," she said, and the words came out of a mouth still full of blood, "I yield. The Kingsblood has beaten the Heir. Claim your thrall and make me your bitch, Master." The word rolled off her tongue like bitter poison.

She was not oiled. She was not prepared. He set the broad head of his cock against her asshole and pushed, and the resistance was dry and furious and real. She locked her jaw and took it. Inch by inch he opened her, the fat shaft splitting a hole that had never been trained for a master's knot, and when she made a sound she killed it before it could humiliate her, and in that moment, something dark inside A'lex vowed to make her make that sound again, louder and bolder.

He fucked her ass.

There was no mercy in it and no pretty words for it. The Horde watched the heir of the High Chieftainess get her hole cleaved open in the dirt of her mother's yard, on the mutated cock of the last human man on Erde, and the only mercy in it was that A'lex did not draw it out for the fun of it. He gave her the length, the rhythm, enjoying the tight heat of her conquered ass, prostrate before him with dark amusement, and when the knot met her rim she was already shaking, already dripping from a cunt that had not existed in this shape a quarter of an hour earlier, and she said, quieter, for him alone,

"Do it. The rite is not completed until I am completely conquered."

He drove the knot in.

It went through her with a thick, obscene punch and locked. She came around it, an unwilling, full-body clench that pulled a raw noise out of her and visibly offended her even as it happened. Ore followed, heavy, prolonged, the same spend that had unmade her cock now flooding the ass of the body it had made. She took it with her face in the dirt and her hands still holding herself open, damned if anyone said she did it poorly.

The knot held them there in the sun. A'lex's hand was in her hair. Her newly softened back shone with sweat. A'lex growled low in his throat, just behind her ear, and Grindal shuddered. The proud orc heir reduced to a quivering anal cock-slut. Behind them the platform of six virgins had gone still. Anne had both hands over her mouth.

When the swell receded he drew free. Ore striped the green of Grindal's thighs and dripped into the dust. She stayed down until she could trust her legs, then rose, naked of the wrap that had torn away in the fight, cockless, marked, standing in the dirt like a newborn faun, shaking and weak-kneed.

Gurall came down from the dais.

She stopped at the edge of the circle the fight had beaten into the yard and looked at her daughter the way a chieftainess looked at a banner that had changed hands. Not soft. Not cruel. Accounting.

"You fought well," Grindal said, and the words she had to lift like a stone were not for A'lex. They were for the Horde. "I am bested. I am claimed. By rite of conquest I am thrall to the one who opened me. The Dravahk'ran have a new sister. The heir has a new master."

Gurall let that settle. Then she raised her voice to the palisades.

"The Cockless chose their master. That choosing stands; it was never the Horde's to unmake." She pointed at the dirt, at the ore, at the woman her daughter had become. "By the old law, she who defeats the heir is the heir. The Unified Horde names A'lex successor to the High Chieftainess. Let the banners hear it. Let the stones hear it. I will not have it said I broke our law because the winner was not born green."

The sound that answered her was the thick, delayed roar of a people catching up to a fact. Not joy. Not grief. The noise a horde made when the punchline of a joke had been explained. There was joy for some, a battle well-fought, an underdog rising. For others there was rage. An interloper taking what wasn't theirs.

Gurall's gaze moved to the platform.

"The six. Unmounted. Intact. They belong to the victor. The Horde has no further claim on their flesh or their holes. Take them."

The guards brought the women down.

No gowns. No covering. They were walked naked across the yard the way prizes were displayed, and the Horde parted for them because the Horde understood the spoils of victory. Anne came first, pale, shaking, her eyes on A'lex's mouth rather than his cock, as if the human part of him were the more dangerous object. Behind her the russet-haired girl stumbled and was kept upright by the soldier's-knot, who had not dropped her chin. The southern-coast woman walked as if she had decided that dignity was something that nudity couldn't take away. The last two held hands and pretended they were not.

A'lex stood in the center of the yard with Grindal's bitch-slick still wet on him and Ai'mal'ee's marks still under his armor and did not tell the six that he was sorry. Sorry was a human concept, and he was no longer fully the idealistic human paladin.

"They are Dravahk'ran now," Ai'mal'ee said, coming forward. She had composed herself; the wetness on her thighs had dried to a faint metallic sheen, and her voice had the carrying calm of a priestess closing a service. "Human thralls of a human master. They will be housed with us. They will be taught what we are. They are yours, master. Six unspoiled bitches for you to conquer and mold to your own tastes."

He looked at the six. He looked at Grindal, cockless and marked and standing as if the new shape of her were a broken axe that she could still learn to use. He looked at Gurall, who had already turned back toward the dais, alone, the succession named and the cost of it already being added somewhere behind her eyes.

"House them," he said. "Teach them. No one puts a cock in them but me."

Ai'mal'ee's mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile. "As the master wills."

The Dravahk'ran closed around the six the way a tide closed around stones, not gentle, not cruel, simply certain. Anne looked back once. A'lex did not follow her with anything that could have been called a promise.

Gurall paused on the first step of the dais.

"Heir," she said, without turning. "You have the Cockless. You have my daughter. You have the six. You have a claim the old law will not let me break. What you do not have is my love, and you will not get it by fucking the things I am required to give you."

"I did not ask for it."

"Good." A pause. "The Horde will test you again. Not today. Not in a circle. In the months to come. In the tribes that smile with their mouths and notice where you sleep. I will not stop them. I will not help them. That is the whole of my remaining kindness."

She went up. The dais took her. The yard began, slowly, to become a yard again, banners loosening, warrioresses turning back to their tribes, the ordinary noise of an army that had watched the world move and was already arguing about where to set it down.

Grindal stayed.

She stood in the dirt with her new body and her old pride and looked at A'lex the way a thrall looked at a master she had not chosen and would not insult by pretending otherwise.

"You fought well," she said, quieter, for him. "I hate the tits, the ridiculous ass. I will learn to use them. If you mount me again, mount me where they can see. I will not be a secret. Secrets are for cowards."

"You are not a secret."

"No." She glanced down at the bare cunt the ore had left her, at the softer hips, at the breasts that sat on her like soft, milk-filled insults she had not agreed to endure. "I am a prize and a slave. Try not to drop me."

She walked toward the Dravahk'ran rank without being told. Ai'mal'ee made room. The Cockless took in their new sister with the flat, practical hunger of a people who had been waiting for a feast.

A'lex stood until the yard had mostly emptied and the platform was only wood again.

The sky over Castle Blacksun had not changed. Same hard blue. Same thin clouds coming off the eastern waste. Same sun that had watched human kingdoms rise and watched the Horde take them apart.

He turned back toward the old temple quarter. Behind him the Horde argued in a dozen tribal tongues about succession and seed and whether a transformed paladin could keep what he had just been given. Ahead of him the Dravahk'ran were already teaching six naked human women the first names of a god they had not believed in yesterday, and Grindal was among them, cockless, marked, learning the weight of a body that had been a warrioress's an hour ago and was a thrall's now.

Ai'mal'ee waited in the path the Cockless had opened.

"The rite is done," she said. "The choosing is public. The heir is named. The flesh and the holes are taken. What comes next is not a ceremony, Master. It is a reign."

"I know."

"Do you."

He thought of the chapel. He thought of the knot. He thought of ore drying on two different shades of green and of Anne's hands over her mouth and of Gurall's back as she climbed the dais alone.

"No," he said. "But I will."

Ai'mal'ee's eyes held a fierce, satisfied light.

"Then come," she said. "The Horde has seen what you are. Now we teach you how to keep it."

They walked into the ruined quarter together. The Dravahk'ran closed the path behind them. Above the palisades the banners of the Unified Horde cracked in a wind that, for the first time since the Horde had been unified, no longer seemed sure which way it meant to blow.

End chapter four